ABSTRACT
Two distinct motivations dictated why Americans went West and why European travelers went West. As historian Roderick Nash has emphasized, Americans went West for natural resources: fur, gold, timber, and homesteads. European travelers went West for “wilderness appreciation,” and even as late as the 1870s, “almost all the nature tourists on the American frontier continued to be foreigners.” 1 They encountered a vast landscape unlike anything in their experience, and they struggled to find metaphors for it.
